Striking the Balance

VI

One of the nice things about Lamar, Colorado, was that when you’d gone a mile past the outskirts of town, the place might as well not have existed. There was nothing but you, the prairie, a million stars shining down on you from a sky clearer and blacker than the sky had any business being-and the person who’d walked a mile past the outskirts of town with you.

Penny Summers snuggled against Rance Auerbach and said, “I wish I’d joined the cavalry, the way Rachel did. Then I’d be riding out with you tomorrow instead of staying stuck back here.”

He slipped his arm around her waist. “I’m glad you’re not,” he answered. “If I were giving you orders, it wouldn’t be fair for me to do something like this.” He bent down and kissed her. The kiss went on for a long time.

“You wouldn’t need to give me orders to get me to want to do that,” she said breathlessly when their lips separated at last. “I like it.” Then she kissed him.

“Hoo!” he said after a while-a noisy exhalation that sent breath smoking from his lungs. Spring was coming, but the nights didn’t know it yet. That it was cold gave him another excuse to hold her tight against him.

After one more kiss, Penny threw back her head and stared up at the night sky through half-closed eyelids. She couldn’t have sent him a fancier invitation if she’d had one engraved. The sweet curve of her neck was pale as milk in the starlight. He started to bend to kiss it, then checked himself.

She noticed that. Her eyes opened all the way again. “What’s the matter?” she asked, her voice no longer throaty but a little cross.

“It’s chilly out here,” he said, which was true, but only part of an answer.

Now she exhaled-indignantly. “Wouldn’t bethat chilly,” she said, “specially while we were doin’-you know.”

He wanted her. They both had on long, heavy coats, but he knew she knew: she wouldn’t have needed to be the heroine in the story of the princess and the pea to tell. But, even though she wasn’t under his command, hauling her denims down and screwing her in the dirt wasn’t what he had in mind, no matter how much he’d been thinking about it when he’d asked her to go walking with him.

He tried to put that into words, so it would make sense to him as well as to her: “Doesn’t seem quite fair somehow, not when you were so poorly for so long. I want to make sure you’re all right before I-”Before I what? If all he’d wanted to do was lay her, that would have been simple. Crazy how being interested in her as herself made him-not less interested in her as a naked girl, but not so interested in that just for its own sake.

She didn’t get it. “I’m fine,” she said indignantly. “Yeah, it hit me hard when my pa got killed, but I’m over that now. I’m as good as I’m ever going to be.”

“Okay,” he said. He didn’t want to argue with her. But when people went from down in the dumps to up in the clouds too darn quick, that didn’t mean they got off the roller coaster and stayed up there. From what he’d seen, the ride kept right on going.

“Well, then,” she said, as if it were all settled.

“Look, here’s what we’ll do,” he told her. “Wait till I come back from this next mission. That’ll be plenty of time to do whatever we want to do.”And you’ll have had more of a chance to sort yourself out, make sure you’re not just throwing yourself at the first guy who’s handy.

She pouted. “But you’re going away for a long time. Rachel says this next mission isn’t just a little raid. She says you’re going out to try and wreck one of the Lizards’ spaceships.”

“She shouldn’t have told you that,” Auerbach answered. Security came natural to him; he’d been a soldier all his adult life. He knew Penny wouldn’t run off and blab to the Lizards, but who else had Rachel told about the planned strike? And who had they told? The idea of humans collaborating with the Lizards had been slow to catch on in the United States, at least in the parts that were still free, but such things did happen. Rachel and Penny both knew about them. Yet Rachel had talked anyway. That wasn’t so good.

“Maybe she shouldn’t have, but she did, so I know about it,” Penny said with a toss of the head that seemed to add,So there. “What if I go and find somebody else while you’re gone, Mr. Rance Auerbach, sir? What about then?”

He wanted to laugh. Here he was trying to be careful and sensible, and where was it getting him? Into hot water. He said, “If you do that, you wouldn’t want to tell him about a time like this, would you?”

She glared at him. “You think you’ve got all the answers, don’t you?”

“Shut up,” he said. He didn’t aim to stop a fight, or to make one worse; he spoke the words in a tone of voice entirely different from the one he’d been using.

Penny started to reply sharply, but then she too heard the distant roar in the sky. It grew louder with hideous speed. “Those are Lizard planes, ain’t they?” she said, as if hoping he’d contradict her.

He wished he could. “They sure are,” he said. “More than I’ve heard in a while, too. Usually they fly higher when they’re on their way to a target, then go down low to hit it. Don’t know why they’re acting different this time, unless-”

Before he could finish the sentence, antiaircraft guns east of Lamar, and then in the town itself, started pounding away. Tracers and shell bursts lit up the night sky, dimming the multitude of stars. Even well outside of Lamar, the din was overwhelming. Shrapnel started pattering down like hot, jagged hail. If that stuff came down on your head, you could end up with a fractured skull. Auerbach wished he were wearing a tin hat. When you took a pretty girl out for a walk, though, you didn’t worry about such things.

He never saw the Lizard warplanes till after they’d bombed and rocketed Lamar, and then only the flames shooting out of their tailpipes. After their run, they stood on their tails and climbed like skyrockets. He counted nine of them, in three flights of three.

“I’ve got to get back,” he said, and started toward Lamar at a trot. Penny came right with him, her shoes at first thumping on dirt and then clunking along the blacktop like his.

The Lizard planes returned to Lamar before the two of them got there. They gave the town another pounding, then streaked off toward the east. The antiaircraft guns kept firing long after they were gone. That was a universal constant of air raids, from everything Auerbach had seen and heard. Another constant was that, even when the guns were blazing away at real live targets, they hardly ever hit them.

Penny was panting and gasping before she and Auerbach got to the outskirts of Lamar, but she gamely stayed with him. He said, “Go on over to the infirmary, why don’t you? They’re sure to need extra hands there.”

“Okay,” she answered, and hurried off. He nodded to her back. Even if she remembered later on that she was supposed to be mad at him, it was better to see her up and doing things than tucked away in her miserable little room with nothing but a Bible for company.

No sooner had she disappeared round a corner than he forgot all about her. He made his way toward the barracks through chaos in the streets. Bucket brigades poured water on the fires the air attack had started. Some of those fires would burn for a long time, and were liable to spread; Lamar depended on wells for its water these days, and well water and buckets weren’t going to be enough to douse the flames.

Wounded men and women cried and screamed. So did wounded horses-at least one bomb had hit the stables. Some of the horses had got out. They were running through the streets, shying from the fires, lashing out in panic with their hooves, and making life more difficult for the people who were trying to help them and help put Lamar back together.

“Captain Auerbach, sir!” somebody bawled, right in Rance’s ear. He jumped and whirled around. His second-in-command, Lieutenant Bill Magruder, stood at his elbow. The firelight showed Magruder’s face covered with so much soot, he might have been in blackface. He said, “Glad to see you’re in one piece, sir.”

“I’m okay,” Auerbach said, nodding. Absurdly, he felt guilty for not having been on the receiving end of the punishment the Lizards had dished out. “What’s the situation here?” That was as discreet a way as he could find of saying he didn’t have the slightest idea what the hell was going on.

“Sir, not to put too fine a point on it, we’ve taken a hell of a licking: men, horses-” He waved at a horse that ran past, its mane smoldering. “The ammo we’ve been stockpiling got hit goddamn hard, too. Those bastards never pounded on Lamar like this before.” He stuck his hands on his hips, as if to say the Lizards had no business pulling a rabbit out of a hat.

Auerbach understood that. Because the aliens didn’t do new things very often, you could get the idea they never did anything new at all. If you did, though, it might be the last mistake you ever made.

Losing the ammunition hurt. “We can forget about tomorrow’s mission, sounds like,” Auerbach said.

“I’m afraid so, Captain.” Magruder grimaced. “Be a while before we can think about it again, too.” His soft Virginia accent made him sound all the more mournful. “Don’t know what’s going on with production, but getting the stuff from one place to another isn’t easy any more.”

“Tell me something I don’t know,” Auerbach said. He slammed a fist into the side of his thigh. “Damn it. If we could have blown up one of their spaceships, we really would have given them something to think about.”

“I know it, too,” Magruder answered. “Somebody’s got to do it-I agree with you there. Just doesn’t look like it’s going to be us.” He quoted a military maxim: “No plan survives contact with the enemy.”

“And isn’t that the sad and sorry truth?” Auerbach said. “The enemy, that dirty dog, he goes and has plans of his own.” He laughed, even if it hurt. “You just can’t trust the son of a bitch that way.”

“Sure can’t.” Magruder looked around at the wreckage that had been Lamar. “Other thing is, his plan tonight, it worked out fine.”

Lamar was a mess, no two ways about it. “Isn’t that the truth?” Auerbach said again.

Thezeks who’d been up at thegulag near Petrozavodsk for a while described the weather as nine months of winter and three of bad skiing. And they were Russians, used to winters far worse than David Nussboym was.

He wondered if the sun ever came out. If the snow ever stopped falling.

Nights were bad. Even with a fire in the stove in the center of the barracks, it stayed bitterly cold. Nussboym was a new fish, a political prisoner as opposed to an ordinary thief, and a Jew to boot. That earned him a top-level bunk far away from the stove and right next to the poorly chinked wall, so that a frigid draft constantly played on his back or his chest. It also earned him the duty of getting up and feeding the stove coal dust in the middle of the night-and earned him a beating if he stayed asleep and let everyone else get as cold as he usually was.

“Shut your mouth, you damnedzhid, or you’ll be denied the right to correspondence,” one of theblatnye- the thieves-warned him when he groaned after a kick in the ribs.

“As if I have anyone to write to,” he said later to Ivan Fyodorov, who’d made the trip to the same camp and who, being without connections among theblatnye himself, also had an unenviable bunk site.

Naive as the Russian was, though, he understood camp lingo far better than Nussboym did. “You are a dumbzhid,” he said, without the malice with which theblatnoy had loaded the word. “If you’re deprived of the right to correspond, that means you’re too dead to write to anybody anyhow.”

“Oh,” Nussboym said in a hollow voice. He hugged his ribs and thought about reporting to sick call. Brief consideration was plenty to make him discard that idea. If you tried to report sick and the powers that be weren’t convinced, you got a new beating to go with the one you’d just had. If they were convinced, the borscht andshchi in the infirmary were even thinner and more watery than the horrible slop they fed ordinaryzeks. Maybe the theory was that sick men couldn’t digest anything with actual nourishment in it. Whatever the theory. If you weren’t badly sick when you went into the infirmary, odds were you would be by the time you got out-if you got out alive.

He huddled in his clothes under the threadbare blanket and did his best to ignore both the pain in his ribs and the lice that swarmed over him. Everybody had lice. There was no point in getting upset about it-except that it disgusted him. He’d never thought of himself as particularly fastidious, but his standards, he was learning, differed from those of thegulag.

Eventually, he drifted down into a light, uneasy sleep. The horn that announced morning roll call made him jerk as if he’d grabbed hold of an electrflied fence-not that the camp near Petrozavodsk boasted any such luxury, barbed wire being reckoned plenty to contain the likes of him.

Coughing and grunting and grumbling under their breaths, thezeks lined up so the guards could count them and make sure no one had vanished into thin air. It was still black as pitch outside, and cold as the devil’s wife, as the Russians said: Petrozavodsk, the capital of the Karelian Soviet Socialist Republic, lay well north of Leningrad. Some of the guards couldn’t count their fingers and get the same answer twice running, too. All that made roll call even longer and more miserable than it might have been otherwise. The guards didn’t much care. They had warm clothes, warm barracks, and plenty to eat. Why should they worry?

When it left the camp kitchen, theshchi Nussboym gulped down might have been hot. By the time it got ladled from the pot into his tin cup, it was tepid going on cold. In another fifteen minutes, it would be cabbage-flavored ice. He got a lump of hard, coarse black bread to go with it-the regulation ration: not enough. He ate some and stuck the rest in the knee pocket of his padded pants for later.

“Now I’m ready to go out and chop wood,” he declared in a ringing voice that would have sounded false even if he’d just feasted on all the beefsteak and eggs he could hold. Some of thezeks, those who understood his Polish, laughed. Itwas funny. It would have been even funnier if what he’d just eaten hadn’t been starvation rations even for a man who didn’t have to do hard physical labor.

“Work detail!” the guards bawled. They sounded as if they hated the prisoners they’d have to watch. Likely they did. Even if they didn’t have to work, they did have to go out into the cold forest instead of back to the barracks.

Along with the rest of the men in his gang, Nussboym shuffled over to get an axe: a big, clumsy one with a heavy handle and a dull blade. The Russians would have got more labor from thezeks had they given them better tools, but they didn’t seem to care about such things. If you had to work a little longer, you had to work a little longer. And if you lay down in the snow and died, another prisoner would take your place come morning.

As thezeks slogged out toward the forest, Nussboym thought of a riddle he’d heard one German guard in Lodz tell another, and translated it into a Soviet equivalent: “An airplane carrying Stalin, Molotov, and Beria crashes. No one lives. Who is saved?”

Ivan Fyodorov’s brow furrowed. “If no one lives, how can anybody be saved?”

“It’s a joke, fool,” one of the otherzeks hissed. He turned to Nussboym. “All right, Jew, I’ll bite. Who?”

“The Russian people,” Nussboym answered.

Fyodorov still didn’t get it. The other zek’s pinched, narrow face stretched to accommodate a grin. “Not bad,” he said, as if that were a major concession. “You want to watch your mouth, though. Tell that one where too many politicals can hear it and one of ’em’ll rat on you to the guards.”

Nussboym rolled his eyes. “I’m already here. What else can they do to me?”

“Ha!” The otherzek snorted laughter. “I like that.” After a moment’s thought, he stuck out his gloved hand. “Anton Mikhailov.” Like most prisoners in the camp, he didn’t bother with patronymics.

“David Aronovich Nussboym,” Nussboym answered, trying to stay polite. He’d been able to make himself prominent in the Lodz ghetto. Maybe he could manage the same magic here.

“Come on!” shouted Stepan Rudzutak, the gang boss. “We don’t make our quota, we starve even worse than usual.”

“Da,Stepan,” the prisoners chorused. They sounded resigned. They were resigned, the ones who’d been in thegulags since 1937 or even longer more so than new fish like Nussboym. Even the regular camp ration wasn’t enough to keep a man strong. If they cut it because you didn’t meet your norm, pretty soon they’d throw you in the snow, to keep till the ground got soft enough for them to bury you.

Anton Mikhailov grunted. “And if we work like a pack of Stakhanovites, we starve then, too.”

“Which ismeshuggeh,” Nussboym said. You did get your bread ration increased if you overfulfilled your quota; Mikhailov was right about that. But you didn’t come close to getting enough extra to make up for the labor you had to expend to achieve that overfulfillment. Coming close enough to quota to earn regular rations was hard enough. Six and a half cubic yards of wood per man per day. Wood had been something Nussboym took for granted when he was burning it. Producing it was something else again.

“You talk like azhid, zhid,” Mikhailov said. Above the face cloth he wore to keep his nose and mouth from freezing, his gray eyes twinkled. Nussboym shrugged. Like Fyodorov, Mikhailov spoke without much malice.

Snow drifted around treetrunks, high as a man’s chest. Nussboym and Mikhailov stomped it down with theirvalenki. Without the thick felt boots, Nussboym’s feet would have frozen off in short order. If you didn’t have decent boots, you couldn’t do anything. Even the NKVD guards understood that much. They didn’t want to kill you right away: they wanted to get work out of you first.

Once they got the snow down below their knees, they attacked the pine with their axes. Nussboym had never chopped down a tree in his life till he landed in Karelia; if he never chopped down another one, that would suit him fine. No one cared what he thought, of course. If he didn’t chop wood, they’d dispose of him without hesitation and without remorse.

He was still awkward at the work. The cotton-padded mittens he wore didn’t help with that, although, like thevalenki, they did keep him from freezing as he worked. Even without them, though, he feared the axe would still have turned every so often in his inexpert hands, so that he hit the trunk with the flat of the blade rather than the edge. Whenever he did it, it jolted him all the way up to the shoulder; the axe handle might have been possessed by a swarm of bees.

“Clumsy fool!” Mikhailov shouted at him from the far side of the pine. Then he did it himself and jumped up and down in the snow, howling curses. Nussboym was rude enough to laugh out loud.

The tree began to sway and groan as their cuts drew nearer each other. Then, all at once, it toppled. “Look out!” they both yelled, to warn the rest of the gang to get out of the way. If the pine fell on the guards, too damn bad, but they scattered, too. The thick snow muffled the noise of the pine’s fall, although several branches, heavy with ice, snapped off with reports like gunshots.

Mikhailov clapped his mittened hands together. Nussboym let out a whoop of glee. “Less work for us!” they exclaimed together. They’d have to trim the branches from the tree; any that broke off of their own accord made life easier. In thegulag, not much did that.

What they still had left to trim was quite bad enough. Finding where the branches were wasn’t easy in the snow, lopping them off wasn’t easy, dragging them through the soft powder to the pile where everybody was stacking branches was plenty to make your heart think it would burst.

“Good luck,” Nussboym said. The parts of him exposed to the air were frozen. Under his padded jacket and trousers, though, he was wet with sweat. He pointed to the snow still clinging to the green, sap-filled wood of the pine boughs. “How can you burn those in this weather?”

“Mostly you don’t,” the otherzek answered. “Used to be you’d just get them to smoke for a while so the guards would be happy and say you’d fulfilled your norm there. But the Lizards have a habit of bombing when they spot smoke, so now we don’t do that any more.”

Nussboym didn’t mind standing around and talking, but he didn’t want to stiffen up, either. “Come on, let’s get a saw,” he said. “The quicker we are, the better the chance for a good one.”

The best saw had red-painted handles. It was there for the taking, but Nussboym and Mikhailov left it alone. That was the saw Stepan Rudzutak and the assistant gang boss, a Kazakh named Usmanov, would use. Nussboym grabbed another one he remembered as being pretty good. Mikhailov nodded approval. They carried the saw over to the fallen tree.

Back and forth, back and forth, bend a little more as the cut got deeper, make sure you jerk your foot out of the way so the round of wood doesn’t mash your toe. Then move down the trunk a third of a meter and do it again. Then again, and again. After a while, you might as well be a piston in a machine. The work left you too busy and too worn for thought.

“Break for lunch!” Rudzutak shouted. Nussboym looked up in dull amazement. Was half the day gone already? The cooks’ helpers were grumbling at having to leave the nice warm kitchens and come out to feed the work gangs too far away to come in, and they were yelling at thezeks to hurry up and feed their ugly faces so these precious, delicate souls could get back in away from the chill.

Some of the men in the work gang screamed abuse at the cooks’ helpers. Nussboym watched Rudzutak roll his eyes. He was a new fish here, but he’d learned better than that in the Lodz ghetto. Turning to Mikhailov, he said, “Only a fool insults a man who’s going to feed him.”

“You’re not as dumb as you look after all,” the Russian answered. He ate his soup-it wasn’tshchi this time, but some vile brew of nettles and other weeds-in a hurry, to get whatever vestigial warmth remained, then took a couple of bites out of his chunk of bread and stuck the rest back in the pocket of his trousers.

Nussboym ate all his bread. When he got up to go back to his saw, he found he’d gone stiff. That happened every day, near enough. A few minutes at the saw cured it. Back and forth, back and forth, bend lower, jerk your foot, move down the trunk-His mind retreated. When Rudzutak yelled for the gang to knock off for the day, he had to look around to see how much wood he’d cut. Plenty to make quota for him and Mikhailov-and the rest of the gang had done fine, too. They loaded the wood onto sledges and dragged it back toward the camp. A couple of guards rode with the wood. Thezeks didn’t say a word. It would have been their necks if they had.

“Maybe they’ll mix some herring in with the kasha tonight,” Mikhailov said. Nussboym nodded as he trudged along. It was something to look forward to, anyhow.

Someone knocked on the door to Liu Han’s little chamber in the Peking roominghouse. Her heart leaped within her. Nieh Ho-T’ing had been out of the city for a long time, what with one thing and another. She knew he’d been dickering with the Japanese, which revolted her, but she hadn’t been able to argue him out of it before he left. He put what he thought of as military necessity before anything else, even her.

He was honest about it, at any rate. Given that, she could accept that he wouldn’t yield to her, and yet go on caring about him. Most men, from all she’d seen, would promise you they’d never do something, go ahead and do it anyway, and then either deny that they’d promised or that they’d done it or both.Usually both, she thought with a curl of her lip.

The knock came again, louder and more insistent. She scrambled to her feet. If Nieh was knocking like that, maybe he hadn’t bedded down with the first singsong girl he’d seen after his prong got heavy. If so, that spoke well for him-and meant she ought to be extra grateful now.

Smiling, she hurried to the door, lifted the bar, and opened it wide. But it wasn’t Nieh standing in the hall, it was his aide, Hsia Shou-Tao. The smile slid from her face; she made haste to stand straight like a soldier, abandoning the saucy tilt to her hip that she’d put on for Nieh.

Too late. Hsia’s broad, ugly features twisted into a lecherous grin. “What a fine-looking woman you are!” he said, and spat on the floor of the hall. He never let anyone forget he was a peasant by birth, and took any slight trace of polite manners as a bourgeois affectation and probably the sign of counterrevolutionary thought.

“What do you want?” Liu Han asked coldly. She knew the most probable answer to that, but she might have been wrong. There was at least a chance Hsia had come up here on Party business rather than in the hope of sliding his Proud Pestle into her Jade Gate.

She didn’t stand aside to let him into the room, but he came in anyway. He was blocky and broad-shouldered and strong as a bullock-when he moved forward, he would walk right over you if you didn’t get out of his way. Still trying to keep his voice sweet, though, he said, “You did a fine job, helping to blow up the little scaly devils with those bombs in the gear the animal-show men used. That was clever, and I admit it.”

“That was also a long time ago now,” Liu Han said. “Why pick this time to come and give me a compliment?”

“Any time is a good time,” Hsia Shou-Tao answered. Casually, he kicked the door shut behind him. Liu Han knew exactly what that meant. She started to worry. Not many people were in the roominghouse in the middle of the afternoon. She wished she hadn’t opened the door. Hsia went on, “I’ve had my eye on you for a long time, do you know that?”

Liu Han knew it only too well. She said, “I am not your woman. I am partnered to Nieh Ho-T’ing.” Maybe that would make him remember he had no business being up here sniffing after her. He did respect Nieh, and did do as Nieh ordered him-when those orders had nothing to do with women, at any rate.

Hsia laughed. Liu Han did not think it was funny. Hsia said, “He is a good Communist, Nieh is. He will not mind sharing what he has.” With no more ado than that, he lunged at her.

She tried to push him away. He laughed again-he was much stronger than she was. He bent his face down to hers. When he tried to kiss her, she tried to bite him. Without any visible show of anger, he slapped her in the face. His erection, big and thick, rammed against her hipbone. He shoved her down onto the thick pile of bedding in a corner of the room, got down beside her, and started puffing off her black cotton trousers.

In pain, half stunned, for a moment she lay still and unresisting. Her mind flew back to the bad days aboard the little scaly devils’ airplane that never came down, when the little devils had brought men into her metal cell and they’d had their way with her, whether she wanted them or not. She was a woman; the scaly devils starved her if she did not give in; what could she do?

Then, she’d been able to do nothing except yield. She’d been altogether in the little scaly devils’ power-and she’d been an ignorant peasant woman who knew no better than to do whatever was demanded of her.

She wasn’t like that any more. Instead of fear and submission, what shot through her was rage so raw and red, she marveled it didn’t make her explode. Hsia Shou-Tao yanked her trousers off over her ankles and flung them against the wall. Then he pulled down his own, just halfway. The head of his organ, rampantly free of its foreskin, slapped Liu Han’s bare thigh.

She brought up her knee and rammed it into his crotch as hard as she could.

His eyes went wide and round as a foreign devil’s, with white all around the iris. He made a noise half groan, half scream, and folded up on himself like a pocketknife, his hands clutching the precious parts she’d wounded.

If she gave him any chance to recover, he’d hurt her badly, maybe even kill her. Careless that she was naked from the waist down, she scrambled away from him, snatched a long sharp knife out of the bottom drawer of the chest by the window, and went back to touch the edge of the blade to his thick, bull-like neck.

“You bitch, you whore, you-” He took one hand away from his injured privates to try to knock her aside.

She bore down on the blade. Blood trickled from the cut. “Hold very still,Comrade,” she hissed, loading what should have been an honored title with every ounce of scorn she could. “If you think I wouldn’t like to see you dead, you’re even stupider than I give you credit for.”

Hsia froze. Liu Han pressed the knife in a little deeper anyhow. “Careful,” he said in a tiny, strangled voice: the more he made his throat move, the more the knife cut him.

“Why should I be careful?” she snarled. It was, she realized, a good question. The longer this tableau held, the better the odds Hsia Shou-Tao would find a way to turn the tables on her. Killing him now would make sure he didn’t. If she left him alive, she’d have to move fast, while he was still too shocked and in too much pain to think clearly. “Are you ever going to do that to me again?” she demanded.

He started to shake his head, but that made the knife blade move in his flesh, too. “No,” he whispered.

She started to ask if he would ever do such a thing to any other woman again, but changed her mind before the words crossed her lips. He would say no to that, too, but he would undoubtedly be lying. Thinking of one lie would make it easier for him to think of others. Instead, she said, “Get on your hands and knees-slowly. Don’t do anything to get yourself bled out like a pig.”

He managed. He was awkward not just because of his battered testicles but also because his trousers were still in disarray, impeding his movement. That was one of the things Liu Han counted on: even if he wanted to grab her, having his pants around his ankles would slow him up.

She took the knife away from his neck, stuck it in the small of the back. “Now crawl to the door,” she said. “If you think you can knock me down before I shove this all the way in, go ahead and try.”

Hsia Shou-Tao crawled. At Liu Han’s order, he pulled the door open and crawled out into the hall. She thought about kicking him again as he left, but decided not to. After the humiliation from that, she would have to kill him. He hadn’t cared what humiliation he might visit on her, but she couldn’t afford to be so cavalier.

She slammed the door after him, let the bar down with a thud. Only then, after it was over, did she start to shake. She looked down at the knife in her hand. She could never leave the room unarmed, not now. She couldn’t leave the knife in a drawer while she slept any more, either. It would have to stay in the bedding with her.

She walked over, got her trousers, and started to put them back on. Then she paused and threw them down again. She took a scrap of rag, wet it in the pitcher on the chest of drawers, and used it to scrub at the spot where Hsia Shou-Tao’s penis had rubbed against her. Only after that was done did she get dressed.

A couple of hours later, someone knocked on the door. Ice shot up Liu Han’s back. She grabbed the knife. “Who is it?” she asked, weapon in hand. She realized it might not do her any good. If Hsia had a pistol, he could shoot through the door and leave her dead or dying at no risk to himself.

But the answer came quick and clear: “Nieh Ho-T’ing.” With a gasp of relief, she unbarred the door and let him in.

“Oh, it’s so good to be back in Peking,” he exclaimed. But as he moved to embrace her, he saw the knife in her hand. “What’s this?” he asked, one eyebrow rising.

What it was seemed obvious. As for why it was-Liu Han had thought she’d be able to keep silent about Hsia’s attack, but at the first question the tale poured forth. Nieh listened impassively; he kept silent, except for a couple of questions to guide her along, till she was through.

“What do we do about this man?” Liu Han demanded. “I know I am not the first woman he has done this to. From the men in my village, I would have expected nothing different. Is the People’s Liberation Army run like my village, though? You say no. Do you mean it?”

“I do not think Hsia will bother you again, not that way,” Nieh said. “If he did, he would be a bigger fool than I know him to be.”

“It is not enough,” Liu Han said. The memory of Hsia Shou-Tao tearing at her clothing brought almost as much fury as had the actual assault. “It’s not me alone-he needs to be punished so he never does this to anyone.”

“The only sure way to manage that is to purge him, and the cause needs him, even if he is not the perfect man for it,” Nieh Ho-T’ing answered. He held up a hand to forestall Liu Han’s irate reply. “We shall see what revolutionary justice can accomplish. Come down to the meeting of the executive committee tonight.” He paused thoughtfully. “That will also be a way of getting your views heard there more often. You are a very sensible woman. Perhaps you will be a member before too long.”

“I will come,” Liu Han said, concealing her satisfaction. She had come before the executive committee before, when she was advocating and refining her plan for bombing the little scaly devils at their feasts. She hadn’t been invited back-till now. Maybe Nieh had ambitions of using her as his puppet. She had ambitions of her own.

Much of the business of the executive committee proved stupefyingly dull. She held boredom at bay by glaring across the table at Hsia Shou-Tao. He would not meet her eye, which emboldened her to glare more fiercely.

Nieh Ho-T’ing ran the meeting in ruthlessly efficient style. After the committee agreed to liquidate two merchants known to be passing information to the little devils (and also known to be backers of the Kuomintang) he said, “It is unfortunate but true that we of the People’s Liberation Army are ourselves creatures of flesh and blood, and all too fallible. Comrade Hsia has provided us with the latest example of such frailty. Comrade?” He looked toward Hsia Shou-Tao like-the comparison that sprang to Liu Han’s mind waslike a landlord who’s caught a peasant cheating him out of his rents.

Like that guilty peasant, Hsia looked down, not at his accuser. “Forgive me, Comrades,” he mumbled. “I confess I have failed myself, failed the People’s Liberation Army, failed the Party, and failed the revolutionary movement. Because of my lust, I tried to molest the loyal and faithful follower in the revolutionary footsteps of Mao Tse-Tung, our soldier Liu Han.”

The self-criticism went on for some time. Hsia Shou-Tao told in humiliating detail how he had made advances to Liu Han, how she rebuffed him, how he tried to force her, and how she defended herself.

“I was in error in all regards in this matter,” he said. “Our soldier Liu Han had never shown signs of being attracted to me in any way. I was wrong to try to take her for my own pleasure, and wrong again to ignore her when she made it plain she did not want me. She did right to rebuff me, and right again in courageously resisting my treacherous assault. I am glad she succeeded.”

The oddest part of it was, Liu Han believed him. He would have been glad in a different way had he raped her, but his ideology drove him toward recognizing that what he had done was wrong. She didn’t know for certain whether that made her respect the ideology more or frightened her green.

When Hsia Shou-Tao completed the self-criticism, he glanced toward Nieh Ho-T’ing to see whether it had been adequate.No, Liu Han thought, but it was not her place to speak. And, after a moment, Nieh said in a stern voice, “Comrade Hsia, this is not your first failing along these lines-your worst, yes, but far from your first. What have you to say of that?”

Hsia bowed his head again. “I admit it,” he said humbly. “I shall be vigilant from now on in eliminating this flaw from my character. Never again shall I disgrace myself with women. If I should, I am ready to suffer the punishments prescribed by revolutionary justice.”

“See to it that you remember what you have said here today,” Nieh Ho-T’ing warned him in a voice that tolled like a gong.

“Women, too, are part of the revolution,” Liu Han added, which made Nieh, the other men of the executive committee, and even Hsia Shou-Tao nod. She didn’t say anything more, and everyone nodded again: not only did she say what was true, she didn’t rub people’s noses in it. One day, probably one day before too long, the executive committee would need a new member. People would recall her good sense. With that, and with Nieh backing her, she would gain a regular seat here.

Yes,she thought.My time will come.

George Bagnall stared in fascination at the gadgets the Lizards had turned over along with captive Germans and Russians to get their own prisoners back. The small disks were plastic of some sort, with a metallic finish that somehow had shifting rainbows in it. When you put one into a reader, the screen filled with color images more vivid than any he’d ever seen in the cinema.

“How the devil do they do it?” he asked for what had to be the tenth time.

Lizard talk came hissing out of the speakers to either side of the screen. Small as they were, those speakers reproduced sound with greater fidelity than any manufactured by human beings.

“You’re the bleeding engineer,” Ken Embry said. “You’re supposed to tell the rest of us poor ignorant sods how it’s done.”

Bagnall rolled his eyes. How many hundreds of years of scientflic progress for humanity lay between the aircraft engines he’d monitored and these innocent-looking, almost magical disks? Hundreds? Maybe how many thousands.

“Even the alleged explanations we get from Lizard prisoners don’t make much sense-not that anyone here in Pskov speaks their language worth a damn,” Bagnall said. “What the bleeding hell is askelkwank light? Whatever it is, it pulls images and sounds out of one of these little blighters, but I’m buggered if I know how.”

“We don’t even know enough to ask the right questions,” Embry said in a mournful voice.

“Too right we don’t,” Bagnall agreed. “And even though we see the stories and hear the sounds that go with them, most of the time they still don’t make any sense to us: the Lizards are just too strange. And do you know what? I don’t think they’ll be a far-thing’s worth clearer to the Jerries or the Bolsheviks than they are to us.”

“For that matter, what would a Lizard make ofGone With the Wind?” Embry said. “He’d need it annotated the way we have to put footnotes to every third word in Chaucer, but even worse.”

“That bit in the one story where the Lizard kept doing whatever he was doing-looking things up, maybe-and the images appeared one after another on the screen he was watching… What the devil was that supposed to mean?”

Embry shook his head. “Damned if I know. Maybe it was supposed to be all deep and symbolic, or maybe we don’t understand what’s going on, or maybe the Lizard who made the film didn’t understand what was going on. How can we know? How can we even guess?”

“Do you know what it makes me want to do?” Bagnall said.

“If you’re anything like me, it makes you want to go back to our house and drink yourself blind on that clear potato spirit the Russians brew,” Embry said.

“You’ve hit it in one,” Bagnall said. He hefted another story disk and watched the shimmering rainbows shift. “What worries me most about having all these go to the Nazis and the Reds is that. If they do manage to decipher them better than we can in this one-horse town, they’ll learn things we won’t know in England.”

“This thought has crossed my mind,” Embry admitted. “Do recall, though, the Lizards must have left all sorts of rubbish behind when their invasion failed. If we don’t have a goodly number of theseskelkwank readers and the disks that go with them, I’ll be very much surprised.”

“You have a point,” Bagnall said. “The trouble is, of course, it’s rather like-no, it’s exactly like-having a library scattered at random across the landscape. You never can tell beforehand which book will have the pretty picture you’ve been looking for all along.”

“I’ll tell you what I’d like.” Embry lowered his voice; some Red Army men and a fair number from theWehrmacht could follow English. “I’d like to see the Germans and the Russians-to say nothing of the bloody Lizards-scattered at random across the landscape. You couldn’t make me much happier than that.”

“Nor me.” Bagnall looked around at the map-lined chamber where they regularly kept the Nazis and Bolsheviks from going for each other’s throats. The readers and disks were stored there not least because it was tenuously neutral ground, with neither side likely to try to steal everything for itself from it. He sighed. “I wonder if we’ll ever see England again. Not likely, I’m afraid.”

“I fear you’re right.” Embry sighed, too. “We’re doomed to grow old and to die in Pskov-or, more likely, doomed not to grow old and to die in Pskov. Only blind luck’s kept us intact thus far.”

“Blind luck and not getting infatuated with any snipers of the female persuasion, unlike poor Jones,” Bagnall said. He and Embry both laughed, though it wasn’t funny, not really. Bagnall added, “Being around the fair Tatiana is likelier to make certain you don’t grow old and die in Pskov than any other single thing I can think of offhand.”

“How right you are,” Embry said feelingly. He would have gone on in that vein for some time, but Aleksandr German chose that moment to walk into the chamber. He went from English to halting Russian: “Good day, Comrade Brigadier.”

“Hello.” German did not look like a brigadier. With his red mustache, long, unkempt hair, and blazing black eyes, he looked half like a bandit, half like an Old Testament prophet (which occasionally made Bagnall wonder how much distinction there was between those two). Now he looked over at the Lizards’ reading machines. “Marvelous devices.” He said it first in Russian, then in Yiddish, which Bagnall followed better.

“That they are,” Bagnall answered in German, which German the partisan leader also understood.

The brigadier tugged at his beard. He continued in Yiddish, in musing tones: “Before the war, you know, I was not a hunter or a trapper or anything of the sort. I was a chemist here in Pskov, making medicines that did not so much good.” Bagnall hadn’t known that; Aleksandr German usually said but little of himself. His eyes still on the reader, he went on, “I was a boy when the first airplane came to Pskov. I remember the cinema coming, and the wireless, and the talking cinema. How could anything be more modern than the talking cinema? And then the Lizards come and show us we are children, playing with children’s toys.”

“I had this same thought not long ago,” Bagnall said. “I also had it when the first Lizard fighter plane flew past my Lancaster. It was worse then.”

Aleksandr German stroked his beard again. “That is right; you are a flier.” His laugh showed bad teeth and missing ones. “Very often I forget this. You and your comrades”-he nodded to Embry, and with the plural included Jones, too-“have done such good work here keeping us and the Nazis more angry at the Lizards than at each other that I do not recall it is not why you came to Pskov.”

“Sometimes we have trouble remembering that ourselves,” Bagnall said. Embry nodded emphatically.

“They have never tried to involve you with the Red Air Force?” German said. Before either Englishman could speak, he answered his own question: “No, of course not. The only aircraft we’ve had around these parts areKukuruzniks, and they wouldn’t bother foreign experts over such small and simple things.”

“I suppose not,” Bagnall said, and sighed. The biplanes looked as if they flew themselves, and as if anyone with a spanner and a screwdriver could repair them. Having him work on one would have been like calling out the head of the Royal College of Surgeons for a hangnail, but he wouldn’t have minded fiddling about with any kind of aircraft.

Aleksandr German studied him. He’d had a lot of Russians and Germans study him since he’d got to Pskov. Most of the time, he had no trouble figuring out what they were thinking: how can I use this chap for my own advantage? They were usually so obvious about it, it wasn’t worth getting annoyed over. He couldn’t so readily fathom the partisan brigadier’s expression.

At last, perhaps talking as much to himself as to Bagnall, Aleksandr German said, “If you cannot use your training against the Lizards here, you might do well with the chance to use it someplace else. So you might.”

Again, he didn’t wait for a reply. Scratching his head and muttering under his breath, he strode out of the chamber. Bagnall and Embry both stared after him. “You don’t suppose he meant he could get us back to England-do you?” Embry whispered, sounding afraid to mention the thought aloud.

“I doubt it,” Bagnall answered. “More likely, he’s just wondering if he can turn us into a couple of Stalin’s Hawks. Even that wouldn’t be so bad-bit of a change from what we’ve been doing, what? As for the other-” He shook his head. “I don’t dare think about it.”

“Wonder what’s left of Blighty these days,” Embry murmured. Bagnall wondered, too. Now he knew he would keep on wondering, and wondering if there really was a way to get home again. No point dreaming about what you knew you couldn’t have. But if you thought you might somehow-Hope was out of its box now. It might disappoint him, but he knew he’d never be without it again.

The Tosevite hatchling was out of its box again, and all-seeing spirits of Emperors past only knew what it would get into next. Even with his swiveling eye turrets, Ttomalss had an ever more difficult time keeping track of the hatchling when it started crawling on the laboratory floor. He wondered how Big Ugly females, whose vision had a field of view far more limited than his own, managed to keep their hatchlings away from disaster.

A lot of them didn’t. He knew that. Even in their most technologically sophisticated not-empires, the Big Uglies lost appalling numbers of hatchlings to disease and accident. In the less sophisticated areas of Tosev 3, somewhere between a third and a half of the hatchlings who emerged from females’ bodies perished before the planet had taken one slow turn around its star.

The hatchling crawled out to the doorway that opened onto the corridor. Ttomalss’ mouth dropped open in amusement. “No, you can’t get out, not these days,” he said.

As if it understood him, the hatching made the irritating noises it emitted when frustrated or annoyed. He’d had a technician make a wire mesh screen he could set in the doorway and fasten to either side of it. The hatchling wasn’t strong enough to pull down the wire or clever enough to unscrew the mounting brackets. It was, for the moment, confined.

“And you won’t risk extermination by crawling off into Tessrek’s area,” Ttomalss told it. That could have been funny, but wasn’t. Ttomalss, like most males of the Race, had no particular use for Big Uglies. Tessrek, though, had conceived a venomous hatred for the hatchling in particular, for its noise, for its odor, for its mere existence. If the hatchling went into his territory again, he might bring himself to the notice of the disciplinarians. Ttomalss didn’t want that to happen; it would interfere with his research.

The hatchling knew none of that. The hatching knew nothing about anything; that was its problem. It pulled itself upright by clinging to the wire and stared out into the corridor. It made more little whining noises. Ttomalss knew what they meant: I want to go out there.

“No,” he said. The whining noises got louder;no was a word the hatchling understood, even if one it usually chose to ignore. It whined some more, then added what sounded like an emphatic cough: I really want to go out there.

“No,” Ttomalss said again, and the hatchling went from whining to screaming. It screamed when it didn’t get what it wanted. When it screamed, all the researchers along the whole corridor joined in hating both it and Ttomalss for harboring it.

He went over and picked it up. “I’m sorry,” he lied as he earned it away from the door. He distracted it with a ball he’d taken from an exercise chamber. “Here, you see? This stupid thing bounces.” The hatchling stared in evident amazement. Ttomalss knew relief. It wasn’t always easy to distract any more; it remembered what it had been doing and what it wanted to do.

But the ball seemed interesting. When it stopped bouncing, the hatchling crawled over to it, picked it up, and stuck it up against its mouth. Ttomalss had been sure it would do that, and had washed the ball beforehand. He’d learned the hatchling would stick anything it could into its mouth, and learned not to let it get its hands on things small enough to go inside there. Sticking his hand into its slimy little maw to retrieve this or that was not something he relished, and he’d already had to do it more than once.

The communicator squawked for his attention. Before going to answer, he quickly scanned the area where the Tosevite sat to make sure nothing swallowable was close by. Satisfied over that, he answered the instrument.

Ppevel’s face stared out of the screen at him. “Superior sir,” he said, activating his own video.

“I greet you, Psychologist,” Ppevel said. “I am to warn you that there is an increased probability you will be required to turn over the Tosevite hatchling upon which you are currently conducting research to the Big Ugly female from whose body it emerged. Do not merely be prepared for this eventuality; anticipate it as near-term reality.”

“It shall be done,” Ttomalss said; he was, after all, a male of the Race. Even as he pledged obedience, though, he knew a sinking feeling. He did his best not to show it as he asked, “Superior sir, what has led to this hasty decision?”

Ppevel hissed softly;hasty was a term of condemnation among the Race. But he answered civilly enough: “The female from whose body this hatchling came has acquired increased status in the People’s Liberation Army, the Tosevite group in China responsible for most of the guerrilla activity against us there. Thus, propitiating her is of increased priority when compared to its importance a short while ago.”

“I-see,” Ttomalss said slowly. As he tried to think, the Tosevite hatchling started whimpering. It got nervous now when he was out of its sight for very long. Doing his best to ignore the little squalling nuisance, he tried to keep his wits on the course they had begun. “If this female’s status in the outlaw organization is lowered, then, superior sir, the pressure to turn over the hatchling also lessens once more, is that not correct?”

“In theory, yes,” Ppevel replied. “How you can hope to turn theory to practice in this particular instance is difficult for me to comprehend. Our influence over any Tosevite groups, even those allegedly favoring us, is more limited than we would like; our influence over those in active opposition to us is, for all practical purposes, nil except for measures military.”

He was right, of course. The Big Uglies were prone to believe that what they wanted would come true merely because they wanted it. The delusion afflicted the Race to a lesser degree.And yet, Ttomalss thought,there ought to be a way. It wasn’t as if the female Liu Han had had no contact with the Race before giving birth to this hatchling. The small creature had been conceived in an orbiting starship; its mother had been part of the Race’s initial study cadre on the bizarre nature of Tosevite sexuality and mating patterns.

All at once, Ttomalss’ mouth fell open. “Are you laughing at me, Psychologist?” Ppevel asked, his voice soft and dangerous.

“By no means, superior sir,” Ttomalss answered hastily. “I do believe, however, that I have devised a way to lower the status of the female Liu Han. If successful, as you say, this will lower her rank and prestige in the People’s Liberation Army and will allow my vital research program to continue.”

“My belief is that you place higher priority on the second than on the first,” Ppevel said. Since that was true, Ttomalss did not reply. Ppevel went on, “I forbid military action against or assassination of the female in question. Either of these tactics, even if successful, will raise rather than lower her status. Some males have fallen into the slipshod Tosevite habit of obeying only such orders as suit them. You would be most unwise, Psychologist, to number yourself among them in this particular case.”

“It shall be done as you say in every particular, superior sir,” Ttomalss promised. “I have no plans for violence against the Big Ugly in question. I plan to reduce her status through ridicule and humiliation.”

“If this can be done, well enough,” Ppevel said. “Getting the Big Uglies even to notice they have been humiliated, though, is a difficult undertaking.”

“Not in all instances, superior sir,” Ttomalss said. “Not in all instances.” He made his good-byes, checked the hatchling-which, for a wonder, hadn’t got into any mischief-and then went to work on the computer. He knew just where to look for the data sequences he had in mind.

Nieh Ho-T’ing turned south offChang Men Ta — the street that led into the Chinese city of Peking from the Western Gate-and ontoNiu Chieh. The district that centered on Cow Street was where the Muslims of Peking congregated. Nieh did not normally think much of Muslims; their outmoded faith blinded them to the truth of the dialectic. But, against the little scaly devils, ideology could for the moment be overlooked.

He was reasonably well fed, which made the curio-shop owners standing in the doorways of their establishments shout and wave with particular vigor as he walked past. Nine out of every ten of that breed were Muslims. Given the trash they sold, that helped reinforce the view most Chinese had of the Muslim minority: that their honesty was not always above reproach.

Further downNiu Chieh, on the eastern side of the street, stood the largest mosque in Peking. Hundreds, maybe thousands, worshiped there every day. Theqadis who led them in prayer had a potentially large group of recruits ready to hand, recruits who could also give good service to the People’s Liberation Army-if they would.

A large crowd of men stood around… “No, they aren’t outside the mosque, they’re in front of it,” Nieh said aloud. He wondered what was going on, and hurried down Cow Street to find out.

As he drew nearer, he saw that the scaly devils had setup in the street one of their machines that could make three-dimensional pictures appear in the air above it. They sometimes tried broadcasting their propaganda on those machines. Nieh had never bothered suppressing their efforts; as far as he was concerned, the scaly devils’ propaganda was so laughably bad that it served only to estrange them from the people.

Now, though, they were up to something new. The images floating in midair above the machine weren’t propaganda at all, not in any conventional sense of the word. They were just pornography: a Chinese woman fornicating with a man who was too hairy and who had too big a nose to be anything but a foreign devil.

Nieh Ho-T’ing walked down Cow Street toward the display. He was a straitlaced sort himself, and wondered if the little devils hoped to provoke their audience into degeneracy. The show they were putting on here was disgusting but. If that wasn’t what they intended, apparently pointless.

As Nieh drew nearer the picture machine, the foreign devil, who had had his head lowered for a while so he could tease the woman’s nipple with his tongue, raised it again. Nieh stopped in his tracks, so suddenly that a laborer behind him carrying two buckets on a shoulder pole almost ran into him and shouted angrily. Nieh ignored the fellow. He recognized the foreign devil. It was Bobby Fiore, the man who had put Liu Han’s baby into her.

Then the woman whose straining thighs clenched Bobby Fiore’s flanks turned her face toward Nieh, and he saw that she was Liu Han. He bit his lip. Her features were slack with lust. The pictures had sound accompanying them. He listened to her little gasps of pleasure, just as he had when he held her in his arms.

In the pictures, Liu Han moaned. Bobby Fiore grunted like a stuck pig. Both of them glistened with sweat. A Chinese man-a running dog for the little scaly devils-spoke over their ecstatic noises, explaining to the crowd what it was watching: “Here we see the famous people’s revolutionary Liu Han as she relaxes between her murders. Aren’t you proud to have this kind of person claiming to represent you? Don’t you hope she gets everything she wants?”

“Eee,”said one of the men around the picture machine, “I think she is getting everything she wants. That foreign devil, he’s made like a donkey.” Everyone who heard him laughed-including Nieh Ho-T’ing, though stretching his mouth into the proper shape and making the right sounds come out of his throat hurt as if he were being flayed with knives.

The machine started a new film of Liu Han-with a different man this time. “Here is true Communism,” the narrator said. “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.”

The crowd of loafers guffawed at that, too. Again, Nieh Ho-T’ing made himself join the men around him. The first rule was not to look conspicuous. As he laughed, though, he noted that the narrator was probably a Kuomintang man-you had to be familiar with Marxist rhetoric to use it so effectively in burlesque form. He also noted that man down for assassination. If he could find out who he was.

After Nieh had stood around for a couple of minutes, he went on to the mosque. He was looking for a man named Su Shun-Ch’in, and found him sweeping the prayer area clean. That bespoke sincerity and dedication. Had Su Shun-Ch’in been at his trade merely for profit, he would have had an underling do the unpleasant parts of the job.

He looked at Nieh with something less than perfect liking. “How can you expect us to work with folk who are not only godless but who put sluts in positions of authority?” he demanded. “The scaly devils are right to scorn you for that.”

Nieh did not mention that he and Liu Han were lovers. Instead, he said, “This poor woman was captured by the little scaly devils and forced to give her body to these men or be starved. Is it any wonder that now she burns for revenge against them? They seek to discredit her, to lower her effectiveness as a revolutionary leader.”

“I have seen some of these pictures the little devils show,” Su Shun-Ch’in answered. “In one or two, the woman Liu Han looks to be forced, yes. In others, though-the ones with the foreign devil with the fuzzy back and chest-she is doing nothing but enjoying herself. This is very plain.”

Liu Han had fallen in love with Bobby Fiore. At first, maybe, it had been nothing more than two miserable people thrown together in a situation where they had no relief save each other, but it had grown to more than that. Nieh knew it. He also knew, from his time with Bobby Fiore on the road and in Shanghai, that the foreign devil had loved her, too, even if he hadn’t bothered being faithful to her.

No matter how true all that was, none of it would matter to theqadi. Nieh tried a different tack: “Whatever she did in the past that the little devils show, she did only because without doing it she would have been starved to death. Possibly she did not hate all of it; possibly this foreign devil was decent to her in a place where anything decent was hard to find. But whatever she did, it is the scaly devils’ fault, not hers, and she repents of having done it.”

“Maybe,” Su Shun-Ch’in said. By Chinese standards, his face was long and craggy; he might have had a foreign devil or two in his distant ancestry. His features lent themselves to stern disapproval.

“Do you know what else the scaly devils did to the woman Liu Han?” Nieh said. When theqadi shook his head, he went on. “They photographed her giving birth to a child, and photographed that child coming forth from between her legs. Then they stole it, to use it for their own purposes as if it were a beast of burden. You will not see them showing pictures of that, I would wager.”

“This is so?” Su Shun-Ch’in said. “You Communists, you are good at inventing lies to advance your cause.”

Nieh reckoned all religion a lie to advance a cause, but did not say so. “Thisis so,” he answered quietly.

Theqadi studied him. “You are not lying to me now, I do not think,” he said at last.

“No, I am not lying to you now,” Nieh agreed. He wished he had not tacked on the last word. Then he saw Su Shun-Ch’in nodding soberly, perhaps pleased he was acknowledging he did sometimes lie. He went on, “In truth, the woman Liu Han gains face from these pictures the scaly devils show; she does not lose it. They prove that the little devils fear her so much, they need to discredit her by whatever means they can.”

Su Shun-Ch’in chewed on that like a man working meat from a chunk of pork that was mostly gristle. “Perhaps there is some truth in this,” he said after a long pause. Nieh had to work hard not to show the relief he felt as theqadi continued, “I will present your interpretation of these pictures to the men who believe as I do, at any rate.”

“That will be very fine,” Nieh said. “If we stand together in a popular front, we may yet defeat the little scaly devils.”

“Perhaps there is some truth in this,” Su repeated, “but here, only some. When you say a popular front, you mean a front you will lead. You do not believe in equal partnerships.”

Nieh Ho-T’ing put as much indignation as he could into his voice: “You are wrong. That is not true.”

To his surprise, Su Shun-Ch’in started to laugh. He waggled a finger in Nieh’s face. “Ah, now you are lying to me again,” he said. Nieh started to deny it, but theqadi waved him to silence. “Never mind. I understand you have to say what you have to say to support your cause. Even if I know it is wrong, you think it is right. Go now, and may God, the Compassionate, the Merciful, someday put wisdom into your heart.”

Sanctimonious old fool,Nieh thought. But Su Shun-Ch’in had shown he wasn’t a fool, and he was going to work with the Communists to fight the little devils’ propaganda. And he was right about one thing: if the People’s Liberation Army was part of a popular front, that front would come to reflect the views of the Communist Party.

After Nieh left the mosque, he went wandering through the streets and narrowhutungs of Peking. The scaly devils had set up a lot of their picture machines. Liu Han’s images floated above every one of them, coupling with one man or another: usually Bobby Fiore, but not always. The little scaly devils turned up the sound at the moments when she neared and reached the Clouds and Rain, and also for the unctuous commentary of their Chinese lackey.

The propaganda piece did some of what the scaly devils wanted it to do. A lot of the men watching Liu Han being penetrated called her a bitch and a whore (just as Hsia Shou-Tao had, from what she’d said) and mocked the People’s Liberation Army for having raised her to a position of leadership. “I know what position I’d like to raise her to,” one wit cracked, and raised a loud laugh around that particular picture machine.

Not all the men reacted that way, though. Some did sympathize with her plight, and said so out loud. And Nieh found most interesting the reactions of the women who watched the record of Liu Han’s degradation. Almost without exception, they used the same words: “Ohh, poor thing.”

They would use those words not only among themselves, but also to their husbands and brothers and sons. The Chinese way of life shoved women into the background, but that didn’t mean they had no way of making their opinions felt. If they thought the little scaly devils were oppressing Liu Han, they would let their men know about it-and, sooner or later, the opinions those men held would start to change, too.

The Party’s counterpropaganda wouldn’t hurt there, either.

Nieh smiled. With any luck at all, the little scaly devils had wounded themselves in a way the Party couldn’t have managed. And, he vowed, he’d give luck a hand.